Here's a thread to share or discuss the best short stories you know of. Looking forward to reading something that has had a big impact on you or that you love for any reason.
Edit to say: thank you everyone for your recommendations, I'll be reading them!
“The Distance of the Moon” from Calvino’s Cosmicomics. I haven’t read it in a decade but I still get a feeling of delight and wonder about our planet just thinking about that story. TW: :anti-italian-action:
"They're made out of meat" has stuck with me for being this absurdist kind of perspective on how Actual Alien contact may go/may have gone. Lovely little short movie made out of a short story.
ted chiang is probably a lib, but i liked his ‘lifecycle of software objects’
The Electric Ant, Progeny, and The Exit Door Leads In by Philip K. Dick are probably three of his best short works.
In typical fashion for pkd they are mostly about perception and reality I guess. But perhaps why these three stick out to me is in how the central focus of the three is how we are programed by our environment to be who we are.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish and Teddy by JD Salinger were both really great, both in his compilation too.
Harrison Bergeron by Vonegut
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman (this gave me actual nightmares which was very silly, I think it was mostly cause I read it when I was way too young)
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, I read it after the movie based on it, Arrival. I think I liked the movie better but I'm a mega simp for Amy Adams.
"The fever" Wallace shawn
Technically it's a monologue play but oh well
http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html
I've been really into George Saunders lately. He's a lib but hates this capital-dominated world. His stories are often turn out as soft scifi, where he takes a single contradiction of capitalism and turns the volume way up to show how perverse it really is. He also has the love, tenderness and compassion of a :vonnegut:, but his writing style is very different.
These are a few of his finest stories (IMO):
The Semplica Girl Diaries is about the stress of workers kept perpetually on the edge of poverty, and the normalization of exploitation of the third world.
Ghoul is a great new story of him that I thought was about labour, but develops into a story about living in a completely fucked system but no one is allowed to talk about how it's fucked.
Brad Carrigan, American is one of his most insane stories about the depravity of commercial entrainment media, and the feeling of being trapped in a system where you have to have to participate in a series of constantly ratcheting-up expectations or fail.
I haven't read many short stories, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich is as good as people say it is
